Empty Dream
Bring me the undergarments of the state and vests of Parliament
I see rains of hatred pounding the face of Juba
Socialists and mongers breakfasting on human delicacies
Political drunkards lolling feeble voters to night mares and empty
dreams
New born democrats buried without traces of memory under the hot hard
granite of politics
Souls drooping in misery
When will sunlight cast its blessings to these cemeteries?
Green lives decomposing in concrete corridors of history
The feet of history dragged in this grief laden earth.
In the 1920s Juba was founded as the capital of Mongalla province in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (as-Sūdān al-Inglīzī al-Maṣri), a joint condominium in the eastern Sudan region of northern Africa. The British wanted to unite the southern Sudan with Uganda, but it was decided at a conference in Juba in 1947 that northern and southern Sudan would be joined instead. In 1955 a Sudanese civil war began, which lasted until 1972. But in 1956 the condominium became the independent Republic of the Sudan. The sectional civil war resumed in 1983 and lasted until 2005. Some 2 million people died as a result of war, famine, and disease caused by the conflict, and 4 million people in the south were displaced at least once. The conflict was marked by a large number of human rights violations, including slavery and mass killings. At the end of the conflict Juba became the interim capital of the Autonomous Government of Southern Sudan. When South Sudan formally declared its independence from the Republic of the Sudan in 2011, Juba continued as its capital. However, warfare continued, with armed rebel groups in at least 9 of its 10 states. In 2013 president Salva Kir Mayardit accused Riek Machar of a cop attempt, provoking a new civil war. A peace agreement was signed in Ethiopia in 2015 and Machar became vice president; when violence resumed Machar fled and was replaced. Another power sharing agreement went into effect in 2018. About 400,000 people killed, and more than 4 million were displaced, with about 2.5 million fleeing to neighboring countries.
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